My newest PC died over the weekend. Seemed to have gotten hung up then upon reboot, never got passed the bios screen. Booted to bios and ran a memory test and it stalled at 67%. Rebooted and no video output at all. Tried a different video card with the same results. Tested power supply and appears to be good. Tried disconnecting components systematically and no response. Looks like the mother board is toast. This is an HP slimline with uses a mini-ITX board. The damned thing is one month out of warranty and HP has had a known issue with a similar issue on this board, it is not one of the models covered under the extended warranty for it. So I put a new mobo on order and should arrive today. The only ones I could find were made by Intel and Zotac. Intel's offerings were lame as none of them had a PCI express slot for video. I run a dual display and have a dual DVI card specifically for this. Zotac does have a few that should be compatible. The only issue with any of the aftermarket offerings is that HP uses a micro ATX connection to the board which apparent;y is not easy to find on short notice. So I guess some splicing is in order. No big deal, I need to extend the power supply ATX connection anyways as the connnection is located muh differently on the mobo.

The good news is the new board will have a max memory of 8 GB and an onboard Nvidia 9300 GPU. While this would share main memory and probably run slower, it also supports Hybrid SLI. Nvidia says the 8400GS, which is the discrete card I have, should work with this so I'm curious as to how much of a boost I might see. Its not really a dedicated gaming rig so I don't plan on relying on it, but since I already have the hardware, it could be a nice boost in performance (any might be better than nothing).

The other issue is since I have an OE copy of Vista on it, I may lose it when it detects the new board. I have seen some suggest calling MS will yield a new activation code and I'd be set, but others say otherwise. Some have had success in transferring it without issue, but as far as I can tell, that required removing drivers and such, which I can't do without a new mobo in place. Worst case, I'll try out a copy of Windows 7 RC, which I downloaded this week. All said and done, I could end up with a better system...

C-Kwik,

Good news is, if you have to get a newer "better" system and you choose to install Windows 7 you will have an operating system that can take full advantage of your new hardware. Windows 7 was designed to set the standard for the technology of computers in the future. There are several new features and benfits from which you will definitely be satisfied. To learn more about these changes I encourage you to check out Talking About Windows -- you may even come up with some good ideas for a new build that is Windows 7 driven!

http://www.talkingaboutwindows.com

JessicaMicrosoft Windows Client Team

try singling out your ram.... if it stalled at a certain percentage you might wanna take a stick out and try it than than swap out the other ones step by step hows that harddrive lookin?

Already tried playing with the RAM. I already finished replacing the motherboard and the old RAM and HDD work fine. I was fairly sure it was the motherboard based on testing and the fact that it matched symptoms associated with defective MOBO's in some HP slimlines. Unfortunately, my model was not included in the list of slimline HP's that had extended warranties for this issue.

JessicaD wrote:Good news is, if you have to get a newer "better" system and you choose to install Windows 7 you will have an operating system that can take full advantage of your new hardware.

Thanks. I ended up installing Windows 7 RC afterall. My OE install of Vista became invalid as I suspected it would. So far it runs well with the only issue so far being that I can't get it to generate a windows experience index score (stalls or runs really slowly).